Kai Murros is probably for most people a curiosity, known best by this image and quote that you see on Twitter occasionally-

So I decided to read a little more about him, and I was astonished. He has the most profound insights of any nationalist thinker I have read, has expressed clearly ideas only dimly seen by me, and proposed solutions to several problems plaguing nationalists.

For a nationalist, he’s pretty off the wall. He comes from a communist or Marxist philosophical background, while rejecting communism and Marxism. In particular he uses the revolutionary ideas of Mao and applies them to nationalism.

He is definitely a socialist and definitely an advocate of the white working class. Laying aside what “socialism” actually means- I don’t want to upset Vox Day!- and considering that all modern political systems have a social aspect, I think this is entirely appropriate.

From cursory study, Mao’s big idea was the concept of the “base area”- an area controlled by revolutionaries where they establish control and gain strength. Everyone else- left and right- seems to have always regarded politics as an urban thing, because that’s where formal politics happen, and that’s where the money and power are. Political events happen in the city, and the result is imposed on the country.

As we saw in Charlottesville, however, leftists control the city. They control the police and the courts. Nationalist activity is aggressively suppressed in the city.

One question for nationalists is, do we have a service organization or a military organization? Golden Dawn is both. Some nationalists- Mindweapon for a long time, Ryan Landry recently- propose a service organization. Ryu advocates direct action.

Murros says it must be both, and this organization must start in the base area or areas. Another problem is, are the police our enemies or our friends? To Ryu, they are the enemy. To VXXC, they can’t be our friends, but they can be neutral.

City police are firmly in the control of leftists and have been for decades. Rural police- particularly in the South- are more likely to turn a blind eye to armed political action, partly because of sympathy and partly because they are few in number.

Rural areas are the best places to start nationalist action. The people are more likely to be traditionalist, feel hostile toward the city power structure, and feel abandoned by it.

The best example is drugs. Legal opioid addiction and associated heroin use are the worst in rural areas. Everybody knows who the pill mill doctors are, and who the drug dealers are, but nobody does anything. White people look to the police, but the police don’t really care. Narcotics enforcement is a tedious business and harder to do where anonymity is difficult. However, if these people get notice they need to leave town, and when they don’t they wind up dead- well homicide investigation is tedious also, and maybe the sheriff is likely to shrug and say “We need the public to come forward.”

In rural areas nationalists can provide social services and also take military action. Nationalists then become the de facto government. Americans are allergic to political violence, but they are fairly comfortable with vigilantism.

Murros puts violence in three categories- state violence, revolutionary violence, and direct action. Revolutionary violence protects the people- to start with, vigilante action against drug dealers, gangs and other criminals. Direct action is what is commonly called terrorism. Murros despises direct action as the lashing out of bourgeois revolutionaries with no connection to the working class- the leftist terrorists of the late 60’s and early 70’s fit well this definition.

I have difficulty condemning any person taking direct action they believe is necessary. I don’t condemn Dylann Roof. Better he stalked and killed black pimps and drug dealers, but the nice church ladies at FAME hate white people just as much. I don’t condemn Anders Breivik. How effective his attack was is up for debate, but the people he killed hated Norwegians and wanted them crushed by African and Moslem invaders.

Violence however is a rough tool, and must be used carefully. Terrorism doesn’t really work because it just frightens and upsets people, and makes them support the system more.

There have been urban revolutions and rural revolutions. The French and Russian urban revolutions succeeded; the Spanish urban revolution failed, because it did not control enough territory. The Chinese and Cuban rural revolutions succeeded, the Vietnamese partially, until massive military power could be applied, and most other rural revolutions have not been successful. Colombia is wrapping up a stalemate on a rural revolution.

In Colombia, the communists had support of landless farm laborers but to the city people they were just kidnappers and extortionists. City people have different interests and perspectives than country people and will not see violence the same way.

This is a very shallow introduction to the topic and I will write more about these ideas in the future.

A simple message to the system- you got what you wanted in Charlottesville. And you also laid the charade bare for the whole world.

We played by your rules. Formally permitted political rally, affirmed in its constitutionality by a federal judge. Free speech. The First Amendment, by God! Everybody gets free speech. Voltaire and all that cheap horseshit.

And it’s shut down. Normally judges rule, but even judges get overruled when the system wants something. Antifa attack the UTR crowd as the police watch. A frightened schizophrenic accelerates into a threatening crowd and is charged with murder. The media spins, spins and spins. The entire Republican establishments sides with the communists.

The alt lites and NRx describe it as an awful failure. The antifa double down on the next few “free speech” events and attack “Nazis” who are just regular Trump supporters. It gets so bad that some Democrats actually back off them.

Trump goes with amnesty, and millions of his supporters are humiliated.

If you think in terms of “optics” it looks like a defeat. But it’s really more of a clarifying moment. Millions of people can now see the system hates them, wants them to shut up and die, and will not pay them the least phony courtesy or lip service. There is a huge population of angry people who hoped some kind of democratic change and have been formally told no, not even a dry bone.

I’m not a civic nationalist, but really civic nationalism would be best for America. It permits groups to live and deal with each other in some kind of civilized context- that’s why it’s called “civil”. But that can’t happen. And if it can’t happen, worse is better, until enough people clearly see what the deal is.

“Vox Day” has been securing his right flank for some time now, with Jonah Goldberg style explanations of why Nazis are leftists and useless losers too.

He has picked up the clever insult “alt-retards” in his attempt to establish his social dominance. The problem is there’s no social dominance here, he’s just a guy, he’s not a leader of anybody. Labeling insiders and outsiders helps group cohesion, but there’s no group here.

This would be normal internet retardedness (on his part, not the “alt-retards”) except some piqued party decided to insult him back, on Gab, the free speech alternative to Twitter, with words that can in all fairness be described as libelous.

So he wants Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, to take them down. Torba is not some guy on the internet, he’s trying to do something to preserve free speech and debate. He has already been threatened by his registrar and doesn’t want to provide private information, take down the posts or close the accounts. So Vox will sue.

Nobody takes internet insults seriously but Vox can cause all kinds of legal trouble for Torba, probably destroying Gab before finding an assetless person to harass with a judgment.

There is no alt right, just people attacking each other while Trump screws them. Pax says don’t accuse Vox of trying to sell books because that’s too easy. I don’t think he wants to sell books, he wants to satisfy his ego and he can because he has enough money from selling books.

To me, this doesn’t seem like a good use of his time. But the nice thing about being rich is you can indulge your ego and use money to put yourself above other people. But hurting Torba and Gab is a shameful way to do it.

Most people, including me, would date the origin of leftism’s link to neoliberalism to the alliance of Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin in the early 1990’s. However in this Atlantic piece, Matt Stoller dates it much earlier, to the early 1970’s.

Liberalism came to mean something a lot different in the 1960’s than it had before. Leftists had always been in favor of protecting the lower classes economically. But as the 20th century went by, they became more and more concerned with what have to be considered moral issues, although they weren’t always framed as such.

Civil rights was sometimes presented as a matter of good governance, the full participation of citizens, but was mostly presented as a matter of morality. The Vietnam War was sometimes presented as a bad policy choice, but was usually criticized as just evil. Sexual liberation, from contraception to the decriminalization of homosexuality, was sometimes a libertarian issue of maximum personal freedom but was usually presented as a moral necessity.

Affluent people slowly went from being businessmen who were mostly interested in making money to professionals who were in the business of telling people how to behave. Widespread prosperity meant the working class didn’t need much help, so economic issues became almost irrelevant by the end of the Vietnam War.

At the same time though their increasing affluence made progressive professionals see things like libertarian businessmen- the economy should be free, to serve them.

Jimmy Carter was the most annoyingly moralistic man to be President, and his record is regarded poorly by most. A journalist who worked for him, James Fallows, posted a thread on Twitter recently listing Carter’s accomplishments.

What they were, were things like appointing Paul Volcker to the Fed chairmanship- the first monetarist in the job, who crushed inflation by crushing the economy- and airline deregulation. I can’t find the thread and don’t remember the complete list, but it was all neoliberal economic policy.

This seems strange for a liberal, but this economic consensus was there before Ronald Reagan, and he only pushed it a little farther.

So for decades liberals have been forcing the problems created by one bad group or another down our throats, while laughing all the way to the bank. But what can’t go on forever, won’t go on forever. They have run out of victims to bother us with- people can stomach gays, but not transexuals, and are long past tired of blacks. “Free market” policies that benefit only the rich have also reached their logical end, since people are now too broke to buy anything.

The next left will be economic and only as rainbow-colored as it has to be. Wall Street will not call the shots any more. The age of bourgeois liberalism is over.

People have been saying neo-reaction, or NRx for short, is dead. I don’t think this is true. The alt right is and always has been a collection of angry misfits; NRx was and is an intellectual movement critiquing the dysfunction of modern society and politics in the West.

NRx emphasized itself as purely intellectual and not involved in any kind of activism, in fact it advocated the “passivism” of Moldbug- be ready intellectually and wait.

The Trump phenomenon tempted NRx into seeing things as moving in their direction, and saw this as their opportunity to get involved. The alt right did also, and in the process the distinction between the two became blurred. Recent events are showing that the two remain distinct.

The relationship between intellectuals and the society they live in tends to be hostile. Consider the Greek philosophers, by which we mean the Athenians. Foremost among these were Plato, who left extensive writings, and his teacher Socrates, whom we know only through Plato’s work.

Athens was a democracy, and Plato and Socrates did not like this one bit. They wanted an oligarchy, and went to some lengths to establish it- leading to the execution of Socrates. They were of the hoplite class, foot soldiers who supplied their own equipment, and thus had to be fairly affluent to participate.

Did the elite philosophers make Athens great? Maybe, but they did not make it possible. The Athenian hoplites were outclassed by the Spartans, and possibly those of other city-states too. Athens was a rich and powerful state because one, it had the best navy in the region. The navy was paid for by the wealthy but staffed by common men. Two, Athens was not on the water, but had walls connecting Piraeus, its port suburb, to the main city so it could keep its navy going and maintain sea trade even if under siege. The Long Walls were built not by wealthy intellectuals but by common men also.

Neo-reaction makes the intellectual mistakes that the common people do not support civilization and cannot create it. I have talked about this here, here, and here. But if you are going to have a civilization you will need a mass of people who can keep it going.

La Griffe du Lion wrote about the “smart fraction”, the idea that the wealth of a country depends on the portion of the population with some base IQ. This IQ will not be particularly high by the standards of competitive admissions universities or accomplished, affluent professionals, but the more healthy white people you have, the more likely you are going to have this thing we call “civilization”.

“The mob” is a phrase that sometimes is thrown out. But a mob is just a group of people, men usually, who want something. If some charismatic, bright fellow can get up on a rock or a tree stump and tell them a way to get it, a mob becomes an army. Once the army controls some territory, they can put up some buildings and you have a city. They can then fight and defeat other cities, or encourage them to “patch over” as the outlaw motorcycle gangs do. If the enterprise is successful then over time it becomes quite respectable.

That’s Rome for you right there. The Romans were not noted for their culture or intellectual refinement, they were known for their military power. This power depended on having reliable foot soldiers, of which the neo-reactionaries have none.

Things have developed rapidly and now we are in a Nazi panic, or as Moldbug would have it, a “brown scare”.

Boston was supposed to be the alt lite’s chance to step up, but instead they abandoned the field, and only a few eccentrics showed up. (The Healing Church, for one. THC? Get it?) But the left came out in full force and fury.

Meanwhile Trump went from condemning racism and hate, to saying both sides were violent, which sent the establishment into a rage. If you have any experience with bullies, you know how they will use some imagined slight to explode with theatrical rage to justify an attack.

Around this time (so many important things happening close together) Bannon was defenestrated and Trump came under full Jewish control- not the usual suspects, the neo-cons, the ADL, the J Street lobbyists, or AIPAC, but his darling daughter, Princess Ivanka and her smirking Prince Consort, Jared.

Aside from the Nazi panic starting with the left, followed by (of course) the Republican establishment, the panic also enveloped some of the alt right, which is not as strange as it may seem. To understand this we need to review post-WWII politics.

After World War II lower-class white interests became anathema. Anglophone politics has always been class based and the Anglophone elite has always hated their lower classes in a way not seen in other cultures, but it became worse. The Democratic Party moved to representing minorities and bourgeois liberals; the Republican Party continued to represent upper-class whites but with the pitch to lower-class whites that this would benefit them also.

Everybody had to agree that the Nazis were the worst ever but the Republicans did this by saying the Nazis were really leftists, because they were socialists! Who could not see this?! It’s an idiotic argument, because all viable political systems contain social elements, and “socialist” means something different in a nationalist context. Still Vox Day in particular has been pushing this.

A more honest thing to say would be “We reject Nazis because they are embarrassing, disgusting social rejects.” The have been various groups post-WWII using the Nazi name, whether or not they actually knew or used NSDAP ideas. And because of the universal condemnation of Nazism, they consisted of and consist of social rejects, freaks, provocateurs, and government agents.

So the Nazi scare is almost universal. And like all witch hunts, if you aren’t sufficiently enthusiastic about hunting witches, maybe you are a witch yourself.

American needs to get past this. Somebody needs to say, “So what? Who cares?”

Why were the Nazis evil? Because they killed a lot of people? The communists killed many more, but to be a communist is highly respectable. The English have killed millions also- in Ireland, of course, but in India as well, and China. They have usually used famine but used opium in China- for the benefit of Jewish drug dealers. The answer to this, given with a completely straight face, is that the Nazis killed by ethic group, which you can’t help, and the communists killed by class, which you can.

Actually your class is almost as immutable as your race and expecting a person to start killing their friends and relatives because some angry Jewish terrorists say so is pretty stupid.

I have written before what I think about National Socialism. I’m not a Nazi but I don’t have anything against anybody who is. Killing large numbers of people is a suboptimal way to manage the population, but compared to communists and capitalists the Nazis didn’t have that much blood on their hands.

I’ll worry about it when they put away the communist flags. Until then, fuck you, asshole.

But in the end it was always going to come down to this. Whites don’t have free speech or assembly. The federal court is quickly obeyed when it follows the system’s wishes, but when occasionally it doesn’t it is ignored. Leftist protestors have impunity.

The alt lite is derided by many, but it’s where most people skeptical of the system feel at home. We can demand our rights, participate in the system, we are not racist or anti-semitic, etc. Theoretically the democratic political system can change things, at least somewhat, to address people’s grievances.

But the system made it formally, officially clear that can’t happen. They could have made some strategic concessions and deflated the balloon. But they’re arrogant and stupid, despite the SAT scores and the Ivy League degrees.

Life and history grind on, driven by forces we don’t understand or even know about. Not even the people in charge know- perhaps them least of all.

The system can’t even keep on its own fig leaves any more. “Rights” with controlled opposition and manufactured consent work great but they can’t even stick to that. Trump announced his support for the Virginia governor and the state and local police so he can’t even manage the ACLU/Voltaire cliche of defending your right to say it.

It’s just going to get weirder. Ryan Landry linked to an interesting article by Gary Brecher on the IRA versus Al Qaeda. It’s worth noting they don’t care about anybody’s life, but they sure do care about their money and stuff.